In any industrial process involving the calcination of lime such as the wet process production of cement, the production of lime itself, and the sugar industry where they calcine lime to use the resultant product as part of the sugar-making process, slurries or muds of limestone or lime are formed which contain large amounts of lime and are recycled into the calcining kilns. Such slurries introduce various amounts of water and such water must first be removed in order to obtain proper calcination. The amount of energy required for such drying; in terms of either hydrocarbon fuel or other type of fuel, represents a substantial cost as does the time involved for drying and many efforts have been undertaken to try and reduce the amount of water in such slurries.
One of the difficulties encountered is that when the filtered solids contents of such slurries reach the level in the range of around 65% solids they cannot be further drained by filtration and become nonpumpable cakes. Efforts to try to fluidize such limestone slurries, often referred to as lime muds, or to enhance water removal by normal methods have not been successful either because they add undesirable components to the final desired product such as the cement or adversely affect the apparatus such as the kilns which are run at exceedingly high temperatures in the level of 1000.degree. C. and higher, or they are too costly at the effective concentration.
Heretofore, therefore it has not been possible to effectively or economically reduce the water content of the lime muds beyond 25-30% nor to maintain them in a pumpable state when such is desirable.